9.Vegetarians, fast bowlers and violence

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Salim Durrani played under Tiger’s captaincy. It was the first Test of the 1966–7 series against the West Indies at Mumbai. India, after a bad beginning, had struggled to make a decent score, with Durrani helping Borde in the rescue act. Durrani made a lovely 55, including one huge straight 6 over Charlie Griffith’s head into the CCI pavilion. If this was classic Salim, so was his dismissal, head in the air, bat askew and bowled by Sobers all over the shop. For much of the match he fielded at third man, just in front of the north stand, and throughout the innings I seem to recall him combing his hair, wearing a rather detached, vacant look. Once or twice his preoccupation with his hair led him to misfield and one could almost feel the electricity passing between the Nawab of Pataudi and Salim Durrani.

India, through some bad catching and a dreadful batting collapse in the second innings, lost the Test. Durrani was one of the casualties. He was replaced by Bishan Singh Bedi. To most Indian cricket followers Bedi was unknown and to some his inclusion was seen as yet another example of the daftness of Indian cricket selection. Little did we know the magic in Bedi’s left arm. But even after we appreciated it we continued to mourn Salim, though he did not make a comeback for almost five years. By then Pataudi had been replaced by Wadekar and nothing could comfort Indian cricket for the lost years of Salim Durrani.

There could be no such feeling about Abbas Ali Baig. In cricketing terms Baig came into prominence at about the same time as Pataudi and, in some ways, made even more of an impact. Baig played so well for Oxford in the 1959 season, that, when the main Indian batsman Vijay Manjrekar, had to withdraw because of a knee injury, the young Muslim cricketer was drafted in. He proved a splendid choice and was one of the few successes for the Indians on that dismal tour. Baig played in the fourth Test, after the Indians had lost the first three, and repeatedly hooked Trueman’s bouncers. Though he was hit on the head by one bouncer, and had to retire hurt, he came back to complete a fighting century – joining a select band of Indians who had scored a century in their first Test.

Baig became an instant Indian hero. Here was a cricketer who could answer fire with fire, bouncers with hooks. His status as India’s up-andcoming batsman was further reinforced the following winter when the Australians under Richie Benaud toured India. Though India lost the series, they won a Test match (their first victory against Australia) and Baig was a central figure in the Indian batting revival. In the third Test at Mumbai, with India always struggling to stay in the match, Baig scored a fifty in each innings. Yet within a year Baig’s cricketing world had been reduced to dust. After the 1959–60 Australian tour, he was to play just five more Tests for India in the next fifteen or so years. His nemesis came after

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his failure in the first three Tests of the 1960–1 series against Pakistan. His scores were: 1, 13, 19 and 1. Baig was dropped and did not play again for India until the 1966–7 tour of the West Indies when he played two Tests and was dropped. Though he toured England with the 1971 team, he did not play another Test. Baig’s low scores in 1960 and 1961 are difficult to explain, though not unusual. Other batsmen, even very great ones, have had seasons and series like that. What undid Baig was very simply that he was a Muslim playing for India against Pakistan.

The years 1960 and 1961 marked a watershed in India–Pakistan Test cricket. Test series between the two countries had started in the 1952–3 season, when India had won 2–1 at home. India had visited Pakistan in 1954–5 with all the matches ending in dreadfully dull, boring draws. The dull cricket did not make either country keen to have another visit and inany case after 1954 political relations between the two countries progressively deteriorated. Pakistan became more closely involved with American-sponsored alliances, while India became a champion of the non-aligned world.

Pakistan finally revisited India in the winter of 1960. The first Test was played in Mumbai and was a sell-out long before it started. I persuaded my parents to let me visit the flat of one of their friends, which happened to overlook the Brabourne stadium. The route to the friend’s flat passed Churchgate railway station and the entrance to the east stand of the Brabourne stadium. On the first day of the Test I walked towards the flat and saw a whole crowd of very Muslim-looking people entering the stands. One passerby observed the rush of the Muslims and commented ‘No wonder these Meibhais (as some Muslims are called) come crawling out now. It is their team that is playing. No prizes for guessing who they are supporting.’

This bitter remark reflected the feeling of many Hindu Indians during the series – that Muslims in India were all supporting Pakistan. It was this feeling that was to prove the undoing of Abbas Ali Baig. A failure in nonPakistan series, or by a Hindu in that series, might have been overlooked. But against Pakistan the natural, albeit libellous conclusion was that Baig had sabotaged his own chances so that the good of Islam, in the form ofthe Pakistan cricket team, could triumph. Poor Baig heard so many whispers about his ‘treacherous’behaviour and received so many poison pen letters that by the time he was bowled by Haseen for one in the second innings of the third Test in Kolkatta, he was ready to throw in the towel. As Current, a review of India and Pakistan Test cricket between 1952 and 1984, puts it, ‘Confidence was further shaken by a torrent of poison pen letters, telephone calls and telegrams. He opted out of the Indian team after the Kolkatta Test.’

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Baig never recovered from the libellous accusations made against him during that series. A one-down batsman who looked like becoming one of the Indian greats merely proved the Indian adage that batsmen who score a century in their first Test for India rarely score many more runs for India. It was a hoodoo that was to afflict Indian cricket until Visvanath broke the spell by scoring a century in his first Test and then going on to score a few thousand more runs.

As it was, the end of the 1960–1 Test series with Pakistan marked the beginning of an 18-year period when neither country played each other. Interestingly this was also the period when the two great Muslim cricketers that India has produced in the modern era, Pataudi and Durrani played for India. Neither Pataudi nor Durrani played for India against Pakistan. Had they done so we might have seen how their popularity and evident appeal would have stood the test of any possible failure. By the time India resumed cricket with Pakistan by touring the country in the winters of 1978–9, the only Muslim in the side was Syed Kirmani, and hewas so established as a wicketkeeper that few would dare to ascribe his failures to religious feelings. Even then, during the controversial Mumbai Test of 1980–1, there were some mischievous whispers about Kirmani’s loyalty. This, despite the fact that it was his stand of 95 for the seventh wicket with Kapil Dev, with Kirmani making a ‘cheeky’41, which helped India reach 334 in the first innings and played a crucial part in its victory.

But then it is hardly surprising. For Indian Muslims’relations with Pakistan complete the three-sided way in which Hindus view the Indian Muslim. There is the view of the katela, there is the Nawabsahib and then there is Pakistan. It is the interaction of the katela and the Nawabsahib with Pakistan that brings out all the old paranoia and distrust of Muslims. Physically India and Pakistan may be very close, but intellectually and emotionally, they are far apart.

In 1977 Pakistan had a traumatic election leading to the overthrow of Bhutto and the installation of General Zia al Haq. Yet the best reporting on Pakistan in the Indian papers was filed by Indian correspondents in London scavenging reports filed by British correspondents in Pakistan. News coming straight out of Pakistan into India was almost invariably laconic agency dispatches that said very little. Some sixty years after the sub-continent was split, Pakistan for most Indians is still not a living country. It is an ogre, a devil waiting to devour India, a fantastic mistake –but not a country of a hundred million human beings. I can remember very few articles which have talked of the people of Pakistan. Apart from the Indian news agencies there are hardly any Indian journalists based in Pakistan. Few visit the country. It is as if with the traumatic partition of the sub-continent something had snapped in the Indian mind. A limb of

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the body had been dismembered, it was said, and the body had forgotten that it had ever had this limb. Perhaps this was the only way in which the trauma of those days could be faced.

The long cricket break between India and Pakistan intensified this feeling. In the late 1970s and early 1980s cricketing contacts resumed, but it was almost impossible to go from India to Pakistan. Those wishing to visit Pakistan invariably require a visa and the visas have to be issued in Delhi. In the early part of 1984 England visited Pakistan. I happened to be in India then and the Sports Editor of the Sunday Times thought it might be simpler for me to travel from Mumbai to Karachi to cover the first Test. I soon realised the difficulties. I would have to go to Delhi to make a visa application, the Pakistani Embassy in Delhi would have to refer this to Islamabad and by the time the whole thing was settled, the first Test wouldbe over. When I mentioned all this to my Sports Editor he was, understandably, bemused.

It was only when I began to live in England in the late 1960s that I overcame my ignorance and hostility towards Pakistan. This was largely through meeting Javed, who worked with me in a small, dingy, accountants’office just off Fleet Street, where we were both training to be chartered accountants. To Javed all Indians were Hindus and therefore despicable –which revolted my secular conscience about India being a nation for all religions. Javed would call me ‘Indiana’. One of his minor hobbies was to pass himself off as a Mexican with his own version of an American accent. This mixture of Lahore English with a contrived New York accent produced some quite remarkable consequences.

When we first met we circled around one another warily, like two fighters in a ring waiting to land the first decisive punch. But all around us was this alien, white, English world – a world which could scarcely distinguish between Indian and West Indian, let alone between Javed and me. Slowly we stopped circling and came to trust one another. Our friendship grew and seemed to be prospering when, suddenly, Pakistan unleashed its terrible repression of Bangladesh in the spring of 1971.

I was appalled to find Javed not only siding with Tikka and Yayaha Khans but despising the Bengalis in the sort of fascist rhetoric, which, if applied by a white to a black would have incurred all the wrath of the Race Relations Act. In my fading Bengali memory where ideas of a sonar (golden) Bengal still resonated, the Pakistani action was a heinous crime. The fragility of our friendship became even more evident as the repression continued through the summer of 1971. It was not helped by the fact that the Pakistani team just failed to beat England at cricket, while the Indians miraculously won a series against England in England for the first time in its history. Javed felt that events were conspiring in my favour.

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He was convinced of this when in December 1971 India and Pakistan went to war. While his Embassy told him, almost every day, how they had shot down hundreds of Indian planes with all Pakistani planes returning safely, British news media told a very different story. He was no longer the cool Mexican with his supposedly neat American accent. He began to look and sound like a very angry Pakistani Peter Sellers. The Indians had cleverly allowed western correspondents to report the war, and as their dispatches filled the media Javed, desperately needing to marry this with Pakistan’s dispatches, began to believe in a great conspiracy embracing the BBC, all of Fleet Street and me. When the BBC showed the fall of the Bangladeshi town of Jessore, he dismissed the pictures as belonging to a carefully camouflaged suburb of Kolkatta. At the end of the war our relationship was in tatters.

It only recovered through the intervention of an external force: an Iranian who worked with us. He was junior to both Javed and me and would often try to butter up Javed by referring to him as ‘my Muslim brother’. While the Bangladesh war raged Javed inclined to his Muslim brother. But after the war and the liberation of Bangladesh the Muslim angle began to wear thin.

The Iranian’s English was rather poor and he often misunderstood things. He failed his very first accountancy exams because in the general paper asked to write about the ways in which the English waterways system helped the transportation of goods, he had written about the Stock Exchange. It transpired that he had mugged up a certain number of questions and, not quite understanding what the word waterways meant, had taken it to refer to the Stock Exchange. Javed, on hearing his explanation, made malicious fun of his lack of English.

The breaking point came when one day Javed asked him to get the evening paper. Both Javed and I were very keen on cricket scores and in those days the Standard published a special late edition, available in Fleet Street some time after five, which contained the latest cricket scores. It had, I believe, the code number 7RR and Javed asked the Iranian to look for the number and make sure it had the latest cricket scores. But like the confusion between the English waterways and the Stock Exchange, this proved rather too much for him. He brought an edition which contained the lunchtime scores, which we already knew. Javed, furious, turned on him and said ‘You are useless. You don’t know the difference between the English waterways and the Stock Exchange or the difference between lunch and close-of-play scores.’The poor Iranian who knew nothing about cricket, did not know what to say and soon found that even liberal applications of ‘my Muslim brother’did not mollify Javed. After that I was once again ‘Indiana’.

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Perhaps this anecdote proves that cricket can override religious differences, bringing together people of very different backgrounds. Yet the history of India–Pakistan cricket, and the wider role of Indian Muslims in Indian cricket, suggests that even if it does, it does so in a somewhat unexpected way.

Nothing, of course, could have been more unexpected than the relationship that was formed between Raj Singh Dungarpur and Mohammed Azharuddin although it neatly complements the long affair between Pataudi and the Indian cricket public. Whereas in the case of Pataudi it has been a story of the love of millions of Indians, many of them Hindus, for a Muslim Prince, whose wonderful cricketing gifts were blighted by a terrible tragedy, in the case of Raj Singh and Azharuddin it is the love of a Hindu prince for a working-class Muslim cricketer of exceptional ability whose career was ruined by the worst corruption crisis in the history of the game. What makes this story even more interesting is that Raj has always been close to Pataudi, indeed he hero-worships him, and one of his favourite photographs is one of Raj’s father with Pataudi’s father, not long before Pataudi senior died. The picture captures the pair in a jocular mood symbolising the close ties between these two princely cricketing families.

Raj Singh is probably, the last great prince left in Indian cricket, theDungarpur in his name being the ancient Rajput kingdom from where he hails. A medium pace bowler who played for Rajasthan, but did not make the Test team, Raj, as he is popularly known, has been the leading cricket administrator since the 1980s. He has been the manager for several tours, chairman of the selectors and president of the board.

He comes from proud Rajput stock and will happily tell anyone who cares to listen that his clan of the Rajputs never gave their daughters in marriage to the Muslims as the Rajputs of Jaipurs did. This meant they missed out on the economic prosperity that alliance with the Mughals brought the Jaipurs and other Rajput rulers willing to compromise on what the Dungapurs felt was a matter of honour.

His pride in his Rajput ancestry was vividly brought out in June 2000 when he came to Lord’s for a meeting of the ICC. Held in the wake of the Hansie Cronje cricket corruption expose the meeting started in dramatic fashion. Just as the then ICC President Jagmohan Dalmiya opened the meeting, Lord Ian MacLaurin, then chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, circulated a document which he asked all present to sign. This declared that the administrators were personally honest and untainted by the corruption crisis. This was clearly directed at Dalmiya who was facing allegations in India over television deals which was later the subject of an investigation by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigations. Everyone duly signed up. It was rather odd that the rulers of the game, meeting to

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convince the world the game was clean, had first to declare that they, themselves, were clean.

Raj, who had just flown in to represent India, in the absence of the then Board President, was a little too jet lagged at the meeting to raise any meaningful questions but later queried a peculiarity about the document. It was on ECB headed notepaper when, for it to be a valid ICC document, it should have been on ICC headed notepaper. He was told it had been produced by MacLaurin and as a lord he was entitled to get his own way. Raj responded, ‘If you are going to brandish titles, then I can produce a royal family tree that goes back 900 years, not a Lord who got his title through his business activities giving money to a political party.’

Raj’s views on corruption in cricket have been equally forthright and singular. He does not believe that it is possible for any cricketer to fix a match. With cricket being a team game, he argues, no cricketer, is good enough to influence a match on his own. The only one he thinks could do it is Sachin Tendulkar, not that he would ever dream of it.

This belief made him always reject the match fixing charges against Mohammed Azharuddin and ever since the crisis broke Raj has not only championed Azharuddin’s cause but reassured him that one day he will return and play in his 100th Test – Azhar had played 99 Tests when he was banned as a result of a CBI inquiry into match fixing.

Raj, like everyone else in India, had been fascinated by Azharuddin ever since he made his sensational debut in the 1984–5 season, scoring three successive Test centuries. Raj recalls Azhar’s wonder as he was catapulted into the sort of fame success in Indian cricket can bring, staring wide-eyed as he moved almost instantly from a downtrodden Muslim mohalla-ghetto of Hyderabad into a world of celebrities and Bollywood film stars.

I was first aware of the special bond between Raj and Azharuddin during the Headingley Test between India and England in June 1986. The soccer World Cup was on in Mexico and had introduced us to the Mexican wave where sections of the crowd get up and then sit down, and as this rolls round the stadium it creates the impression of a wave. During the Saturday of the Test as India, having secured a substantial first innings lead, tried to build on that platform, the Leeds crowd, frustrated by England’s lack of success, started doing the Mexican wave. This was probably the first time the wave had been seen on an English sporting field. Azharuddin was batting with Dilip Vengsarkar and, as another wave was launched, Azharuddin got out. Raj, the manager of the Indian team, was convinced Azharuddin’s concentration had been disturbed by the wave and he stormed into the press box at Headingley to denounce the crowd for their behaviour. When an English journalist remonstrated that crowds

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inIndia could be far noisier and boisterous Raj retorted yes they could, but they would never stand up as the ball was being bowled.

Three years later Raj demonstrated his faith in Azharuddin in even more dramatic fashion. First as chairman of selectors he picked him to tour Pakistan when his form was poor. He played in the first Test of the series only because at the last minute Raman Lamba, who was to later die tragically, pulled out. Azhar made runs and secured his place. Then when the Indians returned home Raj Singh made Azharuddin captain. The story has now became legendary in Indian cricket. Azharuddin was leading south zone in a Duleep Trophy match. Even this captaincy was unexpected as it had come because Srikkanth who had captained India in Pakistan withdrew making Azhar Captain.

Raj then went up to him and said, ‘Meia [general name for a Muslim], Captain bonagay [Will you be captain]?’

Azhar, thinking he was referring to the captaincy of the south zone team, a position he just acquired said, ‘Mai to captain hoon’[I am already captain].

Raj explained that he was offering him the Indian captaincy but it took sometime for a bemused Azhar to understand the prize he was being offered.

Ever since then Raj has always supported Azhar right through the corruption crisis, and despite the fact that the charges laid against him saw him banned by the Board from all cricket. Raj was the sole voice on the board which opposed the move. Raj has made it clear he should never have been banned and the charges are not well founded. In the summer of 2002 as India toured England Raj speaking at the launch of my History of Indian Cricket used the occasion to embark on a spirited defence of Azhar. This was the first time Azhar had appeared on a public platform since his banning and I could see how moved he was and the close bond between these two very dissimilar men brought together by cricket. Azhar remains the one cricketer to start and end his Test careers with centuries, his last Test innings being against his friend Hansie Cronje’s visiting South Africa in 2000. A few weeks later the investigations of the Delhi police revealed cricket’s corruption.

In many ways the stories of both Pataudi and Raj and Azhar could well be made for Bollywood movies, with the participants all having Bollywood connections. Pataudi is married to Sharmila Tagore one of the great actresses of India, and one of his sons is a well known actor. Raj knows a great deal about Bollywood as he is a close companion of Lata Mangeskar, the most famous singing star of Bollywood, and Azhar’s second marriage is to a Bollywood actress. But, perhaps, because real life is so much stranger than fiction no one in Bollywood has thought of turning it into a movie.